Dangerous Women

One of the most significant themes in the collection concerns women that are powerful, often supernaturally so, and consequentially dangerous or menacing. Usually, these characters represent a particular danger toward men. In “Mantis,” the narrator is a teenage girl who morphs into a praying mantis. The reader learns that her mother and grandmother were mantises also (it is strongly implied that they murdered the narrator's father and grandfather), and at the end of the story, when the narrator's transformation is complete, she eats a boy in the bathroom during a party. “Formerly Feral” relates a very similar turn of events, as the narrator's behavior becomes increasingly wolfish to align with her stepmother's pet, causing her to become more violent at school, picking fights with boys she believes are taunting her. Since both of these stories take place during the protagonists' adolescence, it seems likely the...